At the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump blamed the media for, in his eyes, unfairly attacking the estranged mother of Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, after the candidate’s mother recorded a campaign ad for Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee, in which she called the daughter she has not seen since she was 12 “a liar”.
The ad has been widely denounced this week by Republicans and Democrats because Acton’s mother lost custody of her children in 1978 after her husband, Acton’s stepfather, was charged with sexually assaulting his stepdaughter, who was 12 at the time.
Trump, who was informed on Wednesday by Karen Travers of ABC News that Acton had “suffered sexual abuse by her mother’s husband” as a child, offered his full support for the ad earlier on Thursday, without acknowledging that Acton’s mother was estranged because she had stayed with the man charged with assaulting her daughter.
The president was confronted with that fact by Kaitlan Collins of CNN as he left the White House on Thursday for a campaign rally in Iowa. “Why did you make no mention of the sexual abuse allegations that Amy Acton made against her stepfather who stayed married to her mother?” the CNN correspondent asked.
Trump again professed total ignorance of the sexual assault allegation and attacked the questioner instead. “What happened is the the press has ganged up on a woman making a horrible statement about her daughter. And I don’t know why she should be shielded, or the daughter should be-” Trump said.
“She accused her stepfather of child rape,” Collins explained.
“Wait a minute,” the president continued. “The mother made a horrible statement about the daughter. Said she was a dirty liar.”
Trump then complained to Collins that if his late mother had said made statements like that about him, “you’d be the first one to be broadcasting and you would have found nothing wrong with them”.
The president ignored Collins when she said “but the child abuse allegation is different”.
“The press has ganged up because you hate it, because that one ad should really win,” Trump went on.
“Look, if what the mother said about the daughter is half right, she has no right even running for the governor of Ohio,” the president, who has a long record of documented lies, said – suddenly claiming that making false statement should be disqualifying for a public official.
“What about what the daughter said about her mother?” Collins asked.
“I don’t know what the daughter said,” Trump replied, clinging to his ignorance like a life preserver. “I don’t know.”
“Her mother remained married her stepfather who sexually abused her when she was 12 years old,” Collins repeated.
“Well, when did she make that statement? Was it just recently?” Trump replied, apparently trying to cast doubt on the allegation that was, in fact, made in 1978.
After Collins and another reporter said Acton made the allegation a sa child in the 1970s, Trump said.
“You know, I have no idea. All I know is Amy Acton’s mother said horrible things about Amy Acton, calling her a liar and other things,” the president said. “And I say that she’s fair game.”
“You’re trying to help Amy Acton get elected – the press has teamed up to help Amy Acton get elected,” Trump repeated. “And that’s all it is.”
“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m running… pretend I’m on the ballot,” Donald Trump told supporters in Iowa on Thursday, as he has at each stop on his “midterm blitz”.
“Remember, I’m on the ballot,” he said later in the speech. “Because I am on the ballot. Really, it’s our stuff, it’s going to be taken away. If we if we don’t win, it’s going to be taken away. So I am, really, on the ballot.”
Of course, if the president really wanted to make the midterms a referendum on himself, he could take a page from the leaders of parliamentary democracies and pledge to resign from office should Republicans lose the House and Senate, something he has not done.
Speaking in Iowa on Thursday, Donald Trump told supporters that he had personally encouraged Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, to keep running an attack ad featuring the mother of his Democratic rival, Dr Amy Acton, who had lost custody of her daughter at age 12 because her husband was charged with raping the young girl.
“They did an ad of the mother saying the daughter is incompetent, a liar and disgusting unreliable person,” Trump said, adding some claims that were not, in fact, in the ad.
“My mom would not say that about me – even if she believed it,” the president added, making light of the testimony of a woman who sided with the man charged with raping her own 12-year-old daughter.
“When I first saw it, I said, ‘Wow, that means Vivek easily will win the race’. And then I got a call from Vivek,” Trump said. “He said, ‘What would you recommend? Because I’m getting killed in the press.’ Why? He said, ‘Because they think I should immediately take the ad off.’”
“The mother said horrible things about your opponent,” Trump said. “I said, ‘You’ve got to ride with it’”.
The president made no mention of the fact that the Republican Senate candidate he was there to support, Ashley Hinson, denounced the ad earlier on Thursday. “I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down,” Hinson told ABC News ahead of Trump’s appearance.
As he frequently does at campaign rallies, Donald Trump boasted to supporters in Iowa on Thursday that he “aced” what he called “an aptitude test” that is, in fact, a screening for mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease.
While the test does include a short test of basic mathematical ability, in which patients are asked to perform serial subtraction by 7 starting at 60, Trump claimed on Thursday that the mathematical test was much more complicated.
“The first question easy. The second question is easy. And by the time you get up to number 30, there are many people that can answer those questions. I’ll tell you,” the president said.
“They’ll say like: ‘Take a number, any number’. Say, 49, ‘triple it’, and they go pretty much in this speed, ‘triple it and divide by four; add 2,019; subtract 87; divide by three; multiply by nine. What is the number?’”
As supporters shouted out numbers, Trump just asserted that he solved the problem without saying what the answer is. “Not a lot of people are going to be able to do that,” Trump said. “Not a lot. I did it. I did it three times,” the president said.
In recent rally speeches, Trump has given detained descriptions of different mathematical problems he says were on the test, and claims to have solved, but never provided one answer.
Despite the fact that he is in Iowa, ostensibly to support Republican candidates, Donald Trump quickly turned to attacks on two candidates running in other states, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, repeating false claims he has made before about two prominent Muslim Americans.
Making no effort to conceal the anti-Muslim racism and fear-mongering he has put at the center of his pitch to Republican voters, Trump claimed that El-Sayed is “a jihadist”.
He then recited multiple falsehoods about Omar, including the false claims that she married her brother and that she told an interviewer this week that she did not, “as far as I know”, which she did not.
Donald Trump started speaking, about 40 minutes late, to supporters in Sioux City, Iowa on Thursday by boasting about how well he had done in the state in his own three runs for office.
Unusually, the president acknowledged that his term in office is drawing (slowly) to a close. “You know, we only have a little more than two years left. Can you believe it?” Trump said, before adding: “But I’m going to have a lot of power when I leave.”
He then turned to reciting a litany of lies about Josh Turek, the Democrat running against Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, casting him as a supporter of “taxpayer-funded transgender brutalization surgeries and in favor of men in girls bathrooms.”
Lebron James mimed a golf swing and took an imaginary jump shot, as the national anthem was performed during Tuesday’s Philadelphia 76ers and New York Knicks match-up. His gestures provoked the ire of Donald Trump, who berated him as “no good” and a “TOTAL DISGRACE” on social media.
“LeBron James should apologize to all of those Great American Warriors and Heroes who died for the American Flag, and all that our Country stands for!” Trump wrote in a Wednesday Truth Social post.
The NBA star and Trump have been at odds for several years.
In 2017, Trump rescinded a White House invitation to the Golden State Warriors, after Stephen Curry indicated he would not want to go. James famously called Trump a “bum,” saying his presidency took away from the customary honor.
The feud appeared to rekindle this summer, when in July, Trump suggested James was a “racist,” without much further explanation, after being asked to compare his career to that of Michael Jordan’s.
“I only like people that like me,” Trump said.
Donald Trump is expected to speak soon at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa in support of Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, who broke with the president on Thursday by denouncing an attack ad he has supported in the Ohio governor race.
As Trump defended the ad, from Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, in which the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Dr Amy Acton, calls her daughter “a liar”, Hinson joined the bipartisan backlash against the ad triggered by the fact that Acton was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12, after her stepfather was charged with raping her.
In an interview ahead of today’s rally, Hinson was asked by Jonathan Karl of ABC News about the ad from Ramaswamy’s campaign. “It’s terrible,” Hinson said. “I think about it as a mom, and you think about kid surviving childhood sexual abuse and having to relive that trauma on TV again. I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down.”
Hinson also called the comment from vice-president JD Vance, that he was disgusted by Republican criticism of the ad, “ridiculous”.
“Again, I think it’s wrong and should come down.”
Hinson, who currently represents Iowa in the House, is campaigning to replace Republican senator Joni Ernst, who revealed in 2019 that she was a survivor of sexual assault who had been raped in college.
Hinson spoke at the rally on Thursday about 90 minutes before Trump’s schedule arrival time.
The US supreme court ruled on Thursday that New Hampshire students cannot use their school-issued ID cards as proof of identity to vote, handing a victory to the state’s Republicans.
The high court cited a previous ruling, “lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,” in its decision to keep intact an April state law that struck high school and college IDs from a list of acceptable voter documents. House Bill 323, signed by New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Kelly Ayotte, requires government-issued IDs, such as a passport or driver license.
The Coalition for Open Democracy, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit, had sued to block the legislation, arguing that it raised unconstitutional barriers for the state’s young voting bloc.
Republican legislators nationwide have embraced stricter voter ID laws, framing them as a safeguard against alleged voter fraud. Voting rights groups have argued that the narrow range of acceptable forms of identification disenfranchises millions of voters.
According to the Brennan Center, “more than 49 million American adults don’t possess an unexpired driver’s license with their current name and address. Seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students are especially likely to lack such documents.”
At the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump blamed the media for, in his eyes, unfairly attacking the estranged mother of Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, after the candidate’s mother recorded a campaign ad for Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee, in which she called the daughter she has not seen since she was 12 “a liar”.
The ad has been widely denounced this week by Republicans and Democrats because Acton’s mother lost custody of her children in 1978 after her husband, Acton’s stepfather, was charged with sexually assaulting his stepdaughter, who was 12 at the time.
Trump, who was informed on Wednesday by Karen Travers of ABC News that Acton had “suffered sexual abuse by her mother’s husband” as a child, offered his full support for the ad earlier on Thursday, without acknowledging that Acton’s mother was estranged because she had stayed with the man charged with assaulting her daughter.
The president was confronted with that fact by Kaitlan Collins of CNN as he left the White House on Thursday for a campaign rally in Iowa. “Why did you make no mention of the sexual abuse allegations that Amy Acton made against her stepfather who stayed married to her mother?” the CNN correspondent asked.
Trump again professed total ignorance of the sexual assault allegation and attacked the questioner instead. “What happened is the the press has ganged up on a woman making a horrible statement about her daughter. And I don’t know why she should be shielded, or the daughter should be-” Trump said.
“She accused her stepfather of child rape,” Collins explained.
“Wait a minute,” the president continued. “The mother made a horrible statement about the daughter. Said she was a dirty liar.”
Trump then complained to Collins that if his late mother had said made statements like that about him, “you’d be the first one to be broadcasting and you would have found nothing wrong with them”.
The president ignored Collins when she said “but the child abuse allegation is different”.
“The press has ganged up because you hate it, because that one ad should really win,” Trump went on.
“Look, if what the mother said about the daughter is half right, she has no right even running for the governor of Ohio,” the president, who has a long record of documented lies, said – suddenly claiming that making false statement should be disqualifying for a public official.
“What about what the daughter said about her mother?” Collins asked.
“I don’t know what the daughter said,” Trump replied, clinging to his ignorance like a life preserver. “I don’t know.”
“Her mother remained married her stepfather who sexually abused her when she was 12 years old,” Collins repeated.
“Well, when did she make that statement? Was it just recently?” Trump replied, apparently trying to cast doubt on the allegation that was, in fact, made in 1978.
After Collins and another reporter said Acton made the allegation a sa child in the 1970s, Trump said.
“You know, I have no idea. All I know is Amy Acton’s mother said horrible things about Amy Acton, calling her a liar and other things,” the president said. “And I say that she’s fair game.”
“You’re trying to help Amy Acton get elected – the press has teamed up to help Amy Acton get elected,” Trump repeated. “And that’s all it is.”
The Department of Justice has reportedly opened a criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, over allegations that he illegally profited from his role as an adviser to the former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
The investigation was triggered by a referral from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unnamed officials told both newspapers.
Lewandowski’s lawyer, Adam Trigg, denied the allegatinos in a statement to the Times. “Mr. Lewandowski has not been contacted by the Justice Department regarding any investigation, and he denies any wrongdoing when he was proudly serving his country in a voluntary capacity,” Trigg said.
Noem, who was fired by Trump in March, subsequently filed for divorce from her husband, citing “irreconcilable differences”, amid speculation that she was in a relationship with Lewandowski.
At a congressional hearing in March, a Democratic member of Congress asked Noem whether she had had sexual relations with Lewandowski.
Answering under oath, Noem – who was accompanied to the hearing by her then-husband – dismissed the question as “tabloid garbage” but did not say no.
The state department asked foreign service officials who are up whether they voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, according to a report by the Washington Sun.
Citing several former and current state department officials familiar with the matter, the Washington sun reports that top brass at the state department made clear that only those who voted for Trump would be eligible for the mid-to-upper level foreign service roles. They also reportedly told employees that their donation history would be examined and any donation to Democrats would be disqualifying.
However, politicized personnel decisions are prohibited under federal law when it comes to career civil servants.
The report notes that senior Democrats have been aware of allegations about political affiliations being a factor in career development decisions. “These are critical national security positions and individuals should be chosen for their experience and ability, not their political loyalty. We are working with the House and other relevant committees to thoroughly investigate all such claims,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the outgoing Democrat from New Hampshire, told the Washington Sun in a statement.
A spokesperson for the state department declined to comment on the voting history questions from the Sun, but emphasized the importance of “fidelity” in a statement to the outlet.
“Fidelity means upholding the Constitution and the law and executing policy with loyalty to the American people and their interests,” the spokesperson said. “It emphasizes the critical importance of service, integrity, and policy alignment across the Foreign Service. It is not about partisan behavior but rather about executing the president’s vision for foreign policy.”
-
Donald Trump has defended Vivek Ramaswamy’s controversial gubernatorial campaign ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, and has been widely condemned by Republicans. “Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post on Truth Social.
-
A reminder, Donna Arthur hasn’t seen her daughter since she was removed from her custody when she was 12 – after her husband was arrested, charged and indicted for raping Acton, his stepdaughter. Arthur then fled the state of Ohio with her husband and remained married to him until his death in 2004.
-
Earlier, Mike DeWine, the outgoing Republican governor of Ohio, called on Ramaswamy’s campaign to take down the recent ad. DeWine called the spot “deeply, deeply troubling” and said it was “wrong” to have run it. “I would urge Ramaswamy’s campaign to take this down,” he added. Meanwhile, a key election forecaster has subsequently shifted the Ohio gubernatorial race from “toss up” to “leans Democratic” as a result of the ad controversy.
-
Attorney general Todd Blanche did not rule it out a scenario in which the justice department would weigh in on states’ certifying process or try to block states from certifying the election. “Of course there’s scenarios we could all come up with,” Blanche said when asked by a reporter earlier today. “It is not DoJ’s intention to improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process, but to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that – of course I’m not going to say that.”
-
Calley Means, a senior adviser to US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr who has also worked in the White House to further his “Make America Healthy Again” policies, quit his role today. He said he was doing so with “tremendous respect” for Trump and Kennedy. “They laid out a vision of combatting the entrenched, dark forces in DC that profit from Americans getting sick,” he wrote on social media. “More policy and cultural change has happened around these goals in the past 2 years than any time in history – and I know this movement is just getting started.”
-
A federal judge in California has ordered the Trump administration to halt investigations in nine states – California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin – into whether noncitizens are registered to vote. US district court judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin in Oakland found the government’s effort is relying on data that is full of errors and that it is leading to intimidation of groups performing voter assistance efforts. She said it should be halted until polls close on election day (3 November).
Donald Trump has defended Vivek Ramaswamy’s controversial gubernatorial campaign ad, that has been widely derided by Republicans, and features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.
Donna Arthur hasn’t seen her daughter since she was removed from her custody when she was 12 – after her husband was arrested, charged and indicted for raping Acton, his stepdaughter. Arthur fled the state of Ohio with her husband and remained married to him until his death in 2004.
Trump said the backlash, including from the state’s GOP governor Mike DeWine, is “a concerted and well coordinated attack” to convince Ramaswamy to take down the advertisement.
“Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post on Truth Social. “The ‘Artificial’ News has teamed up against him in order to damage, demean, and embarrass a Republican who is leading in the Polls.”
Trump also denigrated DeWine, the outgoing governor who has endorsed Ramaswamy but clashed with Trump and Vance during the 2024 campaign, and accused him of being “disloyal to the Republican Party”. The president insisted that DeWine “probably wants a Dumocrat to win, and certainly doesn’t want someone who will do a much better job than he is capable of doing”.
Trump added: “Vivek should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals!”
The president said that taking part in the ad “took a lot of courage” for Arthur to do. “What she was really doing was saving Ohio from making a truly horrible choice!” Trump wrote. “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt’.”
Susan Collins’ deciding vote to confirm conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh has become a flashpoint in the Senate race in Maine.
This midterm election is the first time Collins is on the ballot since the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.
“I want to say, for every woman in Maine, if we want to be able to deliver our children safely … the most important thing that we can do for women in Maine is to vote for Troy Jackson for the United States Senate,” said representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman stumping with Jackson in Portland today.
The Guardian was the first to report that the one of the country’s oldest abortion rights groups, Reproductive Freedom for All, would endorse Jackson in this year’s Senate race.
Speaking to the crowd in Portland, Troy Jackson said that – if elected – his “day one agenda” in the Senate would involve repealing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Donald Trump’s domestic policy legislation that was signed into law last year.
“I know will be a big uphill deal. So we can get some semblance of our healthcare back,” Jackson said. “I mean, our healthcare wasn’t good before, but you know, trying to get that back so that we can work on Medicare for all. I believe strongly in that, and that’s my top priority.”
Discussing the immigration crackdown in Maine that saw a 26-year-old man in Biddeford killed at the hands of a federal immigration agent, Ocasio-Cortez noted how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence in Maine has been disproportionate.
“They are sending ICE out in droves to intimidate not just the Somali community, not just the immigrant community, but to intimidate all of us,” the Democratic congresswoman said.
She added that tech companies which have substantial contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are “going out to lunch” on the $70bn funding bill for federal immigration enforcement that Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent, “helped rubber stamp”.
“Whenever this administration is targeting an individual community, it is their way of trying to wedge open the door to compromise all of our rights,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now campaigning in Portland, Maine, alongside Troy Jackson, the Democratic hopeful for US Senate.
“We’ve got a logger that we are hoping to send to the United States Senate, that’s for working people and higher wages, on healthcare and so much more,” she said, describing Jackson on stage.
And following up from our last post, Calley Means has officially announced his resignation on social media.
He said he was doing so with “tremendous respect” for Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary.
“They laid out a vision of combatting the entrenched, dark forces in DC that profit from Americans getting sick,” he wrote. “More policy and cultural change has happened around these goals in the past 2 years than any time in history – and I know this movement is just getting started.”
